Learn on Demand Systems: A Knowledge Pool for Experience-based Training

Corey J. Hynes, CEO & Chief Product Architect

Even as a kid, Corey J. Hynes liked to build things. Back then, it was with Legos. Now, as CEO and chief product architect at Learn on Demand Systems (LODS), he has combined his affinity for building with his passion for sharing knowledge to create integrated digital learning experiences.

We are not talking simple online training webinars or videos. Using the company’s OneLearn Platform, Hynes and his team at Learn on Demand Systems empower organizations of all sizes to deliver experienced-based training, live software demonstrations, and performance-based assessments, anywhere, anytime, and at any scale.

The OneLearn Platform includes two unique learning components: Lab on Demand and Training Management System. With Lab on Demand, you can build hands-on labs that run in the public cloud or in one of his own data centers. Solutions like Cloud Slice for Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS allow companies to build and delivery rich experience-based training in a very short time, with very little overhead. By adding rich assessment tools, metrics, scoring and a full suite of instructor and conference management tools, customers can empower subject matter experts to quickly and easily take knowledge transfer to a new scale, reaching customers at any time, in any format.

The potential in Lab on Demand also extends to the creation of shared labs, opening a vast array of role-based scenarios that reflect the way technology teams really work. Shared labs can be used in a variety of situations, allowing multiple users to work cooperatively or competitively in environments such as Cyber Ranges. Hynes says that security companies in particular, have invested in building these lightweight, easily reproducible ranges to deliver more robust security training.

Hynes says traditional cyber ranges have meant “big, complex, expensive, long-term, complicated undertakings. We are going to take a month to build a mock environment that consists of both physical and virtual assets, we are going to train 100 people over the course of two weeks, and then we are going to tear it down.

We can give you very repeatable environments that you can spin up in an instant and you can run hundreds of thousands of time at scale

In the past, that might have cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.”

At LODS, Hynes and team are taking a very different approach to cyber range. “We can give you very repeatable environments that you can spin up in an instant and you can run hundreds or thousands of time at scale,” he explains. “So instead of gathering your team at a hotel and bringing in a small server rack to train them over a weekend, you can now have this entire cyber range as a collection of virtual machines and you can train them over a weekend, at night, during the weekday, online, in person—it doesn’t matter.” He adds, “And the cost that goes into launching an instance is fractions of what it is when you have to bring in physical hardware.”

“So, rather than thinking of a cyber range as a big item that you are going to spend a lot of time and money on, you can build very small and focused cyber ranges that focus on particular tasks, skills, or technologies, and you can deploy those like any other lab that you have.” Through Learn on Demand Systems’ portfolio, Hynes and team have achieved a streamlined orchestration of experience-based training, software demonstrations, and performance assessments—available on-demand for trainers and instructors alike.

All of this is deployed through the company’s OneLearn Platform, which is built with a network of about 500 training companies, 1,000 instructors, and 3,000- 4,000 content creators and authors that form a collective knowledge pool for an optimized way of learning.